Grease Pencil 2.8 sneak peek

Daniel gives us a quick sneak peek on the new Grease Pencil in the upcoming Blender 2.8

The new Grease Pencil’s main focus is to create a more friendly interface for the 2D artist, while keeping the advantages of having a full 3D suite underneath. Grease Pencil is no longer just a stroke, it’s now a real Blender object with huge improvements to brushes and tools.

Credits go to the Grease Pencil developers Antonio Vazquez and Joshua Leung. While Daniel Martinez Lara and Matias Mendiola support the developers with demos and testing.

This development is currently happening on the ‘greasepencil-object’ branch, based off 2.8, and it will be merged soon so everybody can test using the build-bot.

Absolutely awesome. Personally I am a happy man with the current state of gpencil which I use for animatics, but I admit being able to reposition and transform the entire object is really cool. Also, the absolute line width looks great, and I see the old hatched-line glitch has been taken care of too. The lines look super sleek now. Wonderful. 🙂

I don’t now if this is the place to ask, but…
I think blender should start in 2D with just X and Y axis and the user should add axis so they can work in 2D, 3D or 4D (animation). This would make it more simple when working on stills and basic 2D shapes because all of the tools that the user would not need (such as keyframes) would be removed.
I think blender works to much in 3D animation while it is so powerful for doing other things. It just is not built to do things like say 2D painting while it has alot of the tools a person would need to do so.

*reply to comment about 2D 3D and 4D modes*
Personally i dont think it should be that way. That’s where setting the default start-up interface for blender would come into use. Blender is famously known for it’s 3D use and capabilites, if it started up in 2D it would be super confusing being only able to draw, i would actually choose to uninstall it if I heard all these great things but never got to use it. But as I said before you can just choose it as your start-up interface. Also I found this surprising because after about 2 years of using blender, i never knew 2D animation was a feature in it. 😛

great news, it is a step forward for more flexible work flow. To newcomers with more solid 2d background it would speed up the process of learning and working. 2d animatics, key poses and character development is commonly used by artists all around the world helping the 3d movement to look more natural. Moreover if the community seeks 2d development soon or later it would have the potential of production ready 2d rend. Currently people use tvpaint, toonboom/flash and opentoonz however neither of them have as good 3d implementation as blender has. Thank you for the efforts!

It would be spectacularly helpful for users other than Pepeland to be able to alpha/beta test these improvements. I cannot find builds anywhere. It’s like it’s a big secret. I will be thrilled if Daniel/Antonio et al just happen to arrive at the magic sweet spot of features to make GP a usable tool in a real 2D workflow, but the odds are hugely against their tastes matching everyone else’s real world needs. I am not trying to be snarky or critical. I just want to test what’s being built so my company can make a decision whether to take it seriously to adopt into our pipeline for a fairly large scale anime project.
The main issues with GP for adopting it into a professional workflow are kind of pedestrian and easy to avoid addressing in snazzy feature demos. A sensible fill algorithm that does not demand closed shapes and force an “object based” approach instead of “drawing based” approach is one example. You have to go pretty deep with it to realize how problematic it becomes because you wind up doing a LOT of patching over places where strokes don;t line up. A snapping feature would be incredible but I have not seen that mentioned anywhere let alone users talking about how it might be implemented. Maybe they are addressing it, but there is no way I am aware of to find out. GP as real “objects” will def help it’s other major shortcoming, which has to do with managing your data, layers, grouping, the sort of stuff you run into constantly in a professional workflow. So I guess this message is to the guys doing the hard work that we all want to appreciate so much – LET US TRY IT! Get feedback from other users who want to take GP seriously as a professional 2D tool. If builds are available, please somebody tell me I am an idiot and point me to it because I have looked without luck.